from Persistent to Consistent

Trading Resources

[Created 5th Aug 2012]

This is a fairly free-flowing list of trading resources and sites that I’ve learned from or found interesting above the general ‘noise’ of people trying to sell you stuff about how to trade from the beach in your shorts and so on…

If you’ve got to the point where you’ve managed to avoid indicator madness and have realised it’s ‘price action’ that holds all the keys then imho there’s no better beginner’s trading resource than Chris’s site.

There’s a ton go free and very useful stuff here which will allow you to decide whether or not this approach will work for you and if you connect to it. It’s a big yes from me on this point.

Tom is a bit of a legend in that he does a free webinar every Sunday on what’s been occurring and what’s not worked as well as a more ‘structured’ version every month. There’s whole stack of info on the excellent ‘Fail Better‘ thread on Forex Factory too. Start reading this. Take notes. Get on board.

Tom is also hugely entertaining on the Twitter as @Trader_Dante so go check him out.

This is where we get a little bit ‘off topic’ away from FX however Michael Bigger has written what I could suggest as one of the best books on trading that I’ve read in a long while. How Traders Achieve Creative Flow

He makes a very important point – Build a platform

This is something that Michael’s actually done. Essentially a stock spread analysis platform this is ridiculously intelligent stuff. I think he’s also incorporated something linked to the Twitter API as an information gathering tool but my impression this is for ‘in house’ use only – swine! 😉

FT71 is (I reckon) pretty well known in the US. Maybe not so much in the UK. What this does is sit on top of the data/traders trades and provide a sort of ‘managed service’ above the execution to provide a comprehensive suite of feedback metrics. What FT71 does with this data is use this to help him give feedback on the performance of traders he’s mentoring using the broker platform. This is a sea change as far as the broker/trader dynamic goes.

A slight diversion onto platforms. If you’ve been paying close attention to the interwebs recently you’ll be aware of the following playing out. This is slightly esoteric and revolves around the sort of people who read ‘Wired’ so you can be forgiven for not noticing.

Anyway, there’s a huge kerfuffle around Web 2.0 and the platform in so far as people have found that building a business off the back of say Twitter means that at some un-defined future point the platform can come along and rinse their best ideas off them.

Facebook is doing this and Twitter has just done this with the $ cashtag which Stocktwits came up with. What does this mean for traders?

Not much apart from to point out that ‘trading’ is going to keep on evolving which means that whatever setup, indicator or even EA that you may have built is going to come under threat at some point.

I’ve got a ‘future vision’ of what I want this business I’m attempting to build is going to look like. These sorts of considerations (if you’re like me) are definitely worth getting your head around now. We’re trying to build something in a constantly shifting environment so pay attention. I get the feeling that we’ll all have to become programmers and understand API’s at some point… We’ll see…

More useful stuff now I’ve put that out there. Back to the trading resources…

Hand down the best ‘mobile’ platform for looking at charts can be found here: Trade Interceptor. They also have an awesome ‘back-testing’ module that’s entirely free and doesn’t need a college degree to figure out. I’m going to do a post about using/learning from this at some point soon(ish)

News… Hmmm… Well personally I can’t stand Talking Forex but I do really like Trade The News because I get the same information without having to listen to the voices in my head, no, wait, that’s the speaker… maybe this is me but I don’t want people talking at me when I’m trying to think! Quiet! 😀

There will be more on here related to technology and trading resources soon.